Unreality

27. The Commander

It was late at night when Luther Weiss was finally able to return to his office at headquarters. The mission had been long and tiresome, with frustrating results. On one hand, there had been no human casualties — Nigel Brandon had been rescued safely, and the agents responsible for his rescue, Mephisto, Virgil York and Umbra, had also managed to make it out alive —, but on the other hand, the fugitive sufferer Victor Margulis had also managed to make his escape against all odds.

According to the reports, they had met and engaged the target in close combat deep underground, but ultimately the dangerous cyborg managed to flee as he broke through the combat droid squad that had accompanied the agents. This was not supposed to have been a problem, however, since Luther had ordered personnel from Ethos and Anima to watch every exit of the abandoned Combat Cyberization Research Center, meaning no one should have been able to make it out of there without being spotted and consequently terminated upon reaching the outside. After all, Luther had acquired a map with the outline of the CCRC at the time of its construction and made sure to have every possible entrance and exit monitored without fail, being thorough enough to ensure that even the exit through the sewers was placed under surveillance.

The problem was that a new exit had been formed since the inception and eventual destruction of the research center — a large man-made tunnel, which one of the droids eventually located underneath a pile of decayed machinery in one of the rooms. It travelled underground beneath the expanse of the laboratory all the way into a small exit in the middle of a grove near the ravine where the CCRC had been built.

Victor had likely spent the past year or so digging this tunnel, as a thorough inspection of the underground laboratory indicated that someone had been taking residence there at least occasionally, with various signs of human activity such as remainders of food scattered throughout, as well as dead bodies of relatively recent victims that had had the misfortune of wandering inside.

As if that was not enough, it turned out the fugitive sufferer's threats of having rigged the city of Acropolis with explosives had been a bluff, designed only to get Anima to send Virgil York into the CCRC to meet him.

Needless to say, considering the amount of personnel he had mobilized for the operation, this failure to apprehend the highly dangerous target was quite the blemish on the Anima Commander's record. And the longer he allowed Victor to run amok and unchecked, the more his position as Commander of Anima would be brought into question.

Fortunately, though, not all was bad news, as he had still attained valuable information during the operation at the Combat Cyberization Research Center, courtesy of the observational droid Joshua. After it contacted him reporting Mephisto's successful but costly rescue of Brandon and requesting reinforcements, Luther instructed the AI Partner to make his way towards the agents he usually accompanied, Virgil York and Umbra, and watch over their negotiations with Victor Margulis from afar, without making its presence known to them. Joshua had thus been able to observe the whole exchange between Victor and the two Anima agents without them being aware of the fact that their words were being recorded for him to review later. As a result, he had acquired some very interesting information indeed.

Not even that part of the operation had gone exactly as he had intended though, because, contrary to his commands, Joshua did eventually make his presence known to the two Anima agents, when it stepped in to protect Umbra from Victor's assault, just before Mephisto and the combat droids arrived. The observational droid's actions irked Luther to a certain extent, as he had specifically commanded it to remain hidden throughout the entirety of the operation, and yet it had somehow deviated, however briefly, from those orders. It probably wouldn't amount to anything, since for all York and Umbra knew, Joshua had only reached them when it stepped in to assist them in their struggle against Victor, but the Commander of Anima, who had struggled to keep his subordinates under control as of late, still couldn't help but feel a certain degree of vexation as he noted the grim irony that even a machine programmed to follow his orders had somehow strayed from them.